For good or for evil

Dear Editor:

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a tool to be used for good or for evil.

Too many humans are being sucked into the vacuum of popular milieus – a vast assortment of milieus and they can read only in bursts. Snapshots. Meaning they fail to strategize reading through a longer work with developmental discovery.

We have stopped thinking, preferring to adapt to trendy motifs that lack substance. Consumerism. Sports and entertainment.

Discontinuity and dissociation are rampant and synaptic structures build on this confusion. This is an area of the brain where the poison spreads and the brain can no longer attempt the quantum neurological leap required by reading and critical thinking. 

We step around the essence of being and succumb to incremental patterning. Orwell warned about group think and doublethink. This information horizon requires navigational neuro-mapping around the quagmire.

So to AI or not to AI?

Data centres – how do we decide? We’ve sacrificed so much since the industrial revolution to get our big TV screens, not aware of the deep-seated costs … climate change, dead oceans and crippled atmosphere.

AI is trained to compute everything from potato salad to modern weaponry. Without guard rails to define ways of monitoring capacitation, it will run away with the whole show. That’s what it is designed to do – know everything. Maybe we’re back at that tree; the knowledge of good and evil.

David Courtney,
Belwood